


Vhenadahl

by aban_asaara



Series: Month of Fanfiction 2017 [5]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2019-10-05 01:49:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17315792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aban_asaara/pseuds/aban_asaara
Summary: Merrill has destroyed the Eluvian, but struggles to find solace after losing her sense of purpose. Against all odds, Fenris lends an ear and a shoulder.





	Vhenadahl

**Author's Note:**

> Month of Fanfiction - Day 5 - Friends. I feel horrible about rivaling Merrill in my first playthrough, but this might be one of the good things to come out of it. While I understand why these two don’t get on, I do wish Fenris had shown Merrill a bit more kindness sometimes.

He finds Merrill by the Vhenadahl, sitting in the fork of its enormous roots.

She looks up from the long-stemmed wildflowers she’s been twisting into a wreath. “Fenris,” she breathes, stretching her neck to look behind him, then blinks when she finds that he’s come alone.

He runs a hand through his hair. “Are those from Sundermount?” he asks, pointing to the flowers in her hands. The windward side of the mountain must be abloom this time of year.

She nods. “Not much earth for plants to grow in the city,” she answers as she picks a spray of small purple blooms and starts weaving it into the others, “except in the Viscount’s gardens or the nobles’ yards. But now I know not to pick those.”

“I presume Hawke wouldn’t mind.”

“She’s said that, yes. But I like going to Sundermount. It helps clear my head, and it’s been needing a lot of clearing these days. It gets so full of— _everything_.”

Fenris sits in the shade of the ancient oak and leans back against one gnarled root. Kirkwall summers seem mild after the merciless heat of the Imperium, but he’s glad to be out of the sun all the same. “It is done, Merrill. Doubting yourself now serves no purpose.” He pauses, searches for words that might comfort her. “You did the right thing.”

The sorrow in her eyes is all the starker for the smile she gives him. Her gaze drops back to her hands. “Hawke told you to come, didn’t she?”

He clears his throat. “She—may have suggested that I do, yes. But I wouldn’t have, had I not wanted to.”

Merrill smiles again, and there’s something teasing in the curve of her mouth this time. “That was nice of you to come. I just …” she sighs, then lifts her face to look at the branches of the Vhenadahl stretching high overhead. Specks of light skitter across her vallaslin, glimmer on the green of her eyes. “I thought doing the right thing would feel more … right. I thought I’d know for certain that it _was_ the right thing, but I don’t. Not really.” She looks at him. “How do you do it, Fenris? You’re always so sure of yourself. You don’t ever seem to doubt anything or wish you could undo what you’ve done.”

He can’t help the chuckle that rises out of his chest. If he _allowed_ himself such fancies, he would cave down in the middle. “And you would be mistaken. Nothing is to be gained from wallowing in regrets and what-ifs, however.”

Merrill _hmm_ s, then returns to her wreath as they sit in silence. Fenris watches her slender fingers tug at the stem, twist it, thread it with another, coax the blossoms and leaves into just the right shape. Once satisfied, she calls forth the barest wisp of a flame to burn a length off a ball of twine, not unlike the one Varric gave her the year they met. Then she knots the flowers together into a circlet, and lays it among the candle stumps, coppers, and dried blossoms that rest at the foot of the Vhenadahl.

She looks at him as though she’d just remembered that he was there. “Are there Vhenadahl in Tevinter?”

“I would imagine so, but I’ve never been to the alienage in Minrathous. And no self-respecting altus would defile the landscape of his property with some bedecked tree.”

“Some bedecked tree,” she repeats under her breath. “Is that truly all you see?”

Fenris follows her gaze with his own, up the towering height of the Vhenadahl. It would take a score of children holding hands to surround its bole. Swirls of white paint run over scarlet, cracked over the knots and furrows of the bark. High overhead, branches stretch upwards like arms, and the leaves rustle in a soft breeze to let the dappled, dusty light of the alienage to their feet. A pair of warblers dart out of a hollow, chirping—a rare sound in Kirkwall.

A symbol of Arlathan, he knows, of the Elvhen people and their long-lost homeland, of the old ways and traditions that vanished with its fall, the first link in the long chain of events that would come to enslave him, millennia later.

He knows it. He _understands_ it.

Yet a tree is all he sees.

“I know what it represents, if that’s what you’re asking. But it speaks to me no more than any other tree. I do not miss Arlathan any more than I miss Ferelden or some other place where I’ve never set foot.”

Merrill runs one hand up and down the cracked bark of the trunk. “You didn’t remember your family, but you missed them, didn’t you? You knew something was missing. You knew something was _wrong_. It’s the same thing for me. For so many of us. We’ve lost so _much_ ,” she says, her voice brittle, then takes a breath and blinks the watery gleam out of her eyes. “I know you despise me for leaving my clan behind. But our culture—our history … it transcends me. I thought it was a path worth walking if I could restore even just a fragment of what we’ve lost, but I … I was _wrong_ ,” she finishes, the last word cracking as she speaks it. “How could I be _so wrong_?”

Her small frame shakes as she presses her palms to her face and breaks down into sobs. Fenris sighs, then rises to his feet with every intention to head home—yet he finds himself sitting down next to her instead, wrapping an arm around her shoulders as he knows Hawke would have done. Merrill slumps against him, and cries for a long time.

A few curious heads turn to look at them. Even among elves they stand out: a Dalish refugee from Ferelden and an escaped slave from Tevinter, the both of them foreigners, their skins marked by ancient ritual. Yet no one shoos them off or castigates them for disturbing the peace—and he wonders if that’s not what the Vhenadahl is meant to be: a place of reprieve, a shelter from the sun, an unspoken promise that they won’t be driven away, no matter how unwanted their kind is elsewhere.

Merrill breaks away with a sniffle and an embarrassed chuckle. “Creators, I am _so_ sorry,” she says, wiping the tears off her cheeks with her sleeve. “Thank you, Fenris.”

“It is nothing.”

As she makes her way back to her house, he looks up at the glare of the Marches sun filtering through the leaves high above him.

It’s just a tree. It means nothing to him.

And yet.

He fishes a handful of coppers out of his pocket, and lays them by Merrill’s wreath at the foot of the Vhenadahl.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello on [Tumblr](https://aban-asaara.tumblr.com/)!


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